Building and compilation

This chapter explains the various steps needed to build espanso.

Cross-compilation

At the time of writing, cross-compilation is not guaranteed to be supported. In other words, if you wish to build the exe files for Windows, you must do this on a PC running Windows. For Windows, this means WSL cannot be used to compile Espanso.

Prerequisites

These are the basic tools required to build espanso:

• A recent Rust compiler. You can install it following these instructions
• A C/C++ compiler. There are multiple of them depending on the platform, but espanso officially supports the following:
  • On Windows, you should use the MSVC compiler. The easiest way to install it is by downloading Visual Studio and checking "Desktop development with C++" in the installer. Note that Visual Studio Build Tools alone doesn't fulfill all the requirements for espanso - it's recommended to download Visual Studio.
    • As of the time of writing, you can NOT build in WSL. You must do the build natively in Windows. You must first install Rust for Windows, which requires you to install Microsoft Visual Studio (Not VsCode!).
  • On macOS, you should use the official build tools that come with Xcode. If you don't want to install Xcode, you should be able to download only the build tools by executing xcode-select —install and following the instructions.
  • On Linux, you should use the default C/C++ compiler (it's usually GCC). On Ubuntu/Debian systems, you can install them with sudo apt install build-essential

Installing the app

After installing the prerequisites, the following chapters (Linux, macOS and Windows) will guide you on how to install the app with the command line.

Advanced compilation

Espanso offers a few flags that might be necessary if you want to further tune the resulting binary.

Disabling modulo (GUI features)

Espanso includes a component known as modulo, which handles most of the graphical-related parts of the tool. For example, the Search bar or Forms are handled by it.

If you don't want them, you can build without the modulo feature flag to remove support for it.

Keep in mind that espanso was designed with modulo as a first class citizen, so the experience might be far from perfect without it.